While every aspect of your business’s online presence is important, the ultimate goal of your online presence is to attract potential customers and sell through your website, making it the foundation of your digital operations. Just as with a physical store, your beautiful website design needs ongoing maintenance to keep it running smoothly and drawing in new customers. This guide will cover all the basics of why website maintenance is necessary, what it should include and how to get the job done right.
Why Does Website Maintenance Matter?
For a significant number of potential customers, the first place they’ll see your business is online. A poorly maintained or out-of-date website is going to give a negative impression of your business, making it likely that potential customers move on to your competitor’s website.
Website maintenance also greatly impacts customer experience, acting in the same way as a talented and engaging salesperson. Without regular maintenance, things start to fall apart, and websites become plagued with broken links, outdated information, and technical issues.
Another good reason for website maintenance is that it’s critical for your digital marketing strategy, and especially your SEO (search engine ranking). Google and other search engines constantly monitor bounce rates (how many people leave your website soon after arriving, after taking no further action), page load speed times, conversions, visitor numbers, session duration, and other metrics that show if people are or aren’t spending time on your website.
Finally, regular maintenance services are essential for securing your website and preventing leaks of sensitive business, customer, and financial information. With 46% of businesses and charities experiencing a cyberattack in 2019 at an average cost of £8,170, security must become a priority for every business with an online presence. The losses from recovering from the attack, downtime, and damage to reputation can be considerable, and a properly secured website is the best way to secure your data and customer privacy.
How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
Your website maintenance costs will depend largely on whether you are using a digital agency or using your business resources to manage your site. If you are considering outsourcing this role to a service provider, it’s advisable to shop around and do your research on different digital agencies and their website maintenance packages, looking at the quality of the provider and their reputation as well as the price of the packages on offer. At the same time, it’s a good idea to measure the cost to your business of running website maintenance in-house, which can include new hires, training, time, salaries, and hardware/software investments.
In addition, it is also good to take into account the renewal costs involved, such as subscription fees, SSL certificates, domain renewals, DNS management and website hosting. Different agencies will include these services as part of their package, so it is best to ask.
Frequent Maintenance Tasks
Let’s start with routine website maintenance tasks that should be carried out every week by your IT team or digital agency. These should be done on a monthly or weekly basis.
- Run a backup – Our advice would be that you should backup your website as often as possible. At a minimum, on a monthly basis, but ideally weekly or even daily like we do.
- Update Plugins and software – Plugin updates and software updates are critical for functionality and strengthening security vulnerabilities. These third-party providers roll out regular security updates as soon as threats emerge or vulnerabilities are uncovered, so it’s essential that they are implemented as quickly as possible. You should also have real-time alerts set on your website to notify you if one of your plugins is vulnerable. Plugin updates should also be done and tested ideally within a staging environment before being pushed to your live website.
- Page load errors – Load each page of your website to check that they are not returning a 404 error and that all images are loading currently.
- Check forms – Perform regular checks on forms including account sign-ups, logins, and contact forms should be checked to ensure they are working as intended and that any anti-spam filters are working efficiently.
- Security updates and checks – Review security reports and check for signs that your website may be compromised. This can include alerts from your browser or hosting service, inexplicable slow load times, and even alerts from customers. It’s also a good time to send out information to customers and employees on online security best practices.
Quarterly Maintenance Tasks
Each quarter, we recommend that you perform the following tasks.
- Website testing – Test your website on different browsers and devices to make sure it is displaying properly and is fully functional.
- Content updates – These content updates usually focus on changes to digital marketing best practices, changing keyword research in response to customer needs, etc. If your keywords need to be updated, it’s important to adjust metadata, blog posts, meta descriptions, meta titles, and website content to reflect this.
- Load speed checks – To test the load speed of your website, we recommend using Google’s PageSpeedInsights to check response time. This is one of the most important factors in user experience because just a one-second delay will cause a 4.9% drop in traffic, while a three-second delay in response time causes a 7.9% drop in traffic. Remember to check mobile load speeds too, as decreasing mobile load time by just one-tenth of a second can cause an increase in mobile conversion rates by 8.4-10.1%. This can also be done more regularly if you would prefer.
- Perform a comprehensive backup – Especially if you have recently expanded or changed your website.
Annual Maintenance Tasks
Once a year, businesses should perform these essential website maintenance checks.
- Website design and structure review – Can the aesthetics, structure, or functionality of your website be improved? Introduce tweaks and adjustments like automation, better quality images, and efficiencies.
- Check your details for errors and inaccuracies – Make sure all details on your website are accurate. This includes email addresses, physical addresses, and contact details.
- Plan your strategy for the upcoming year – Review the performance of your website over the last year and formulate a strategy for the year ahead, planning for if you need a website design as well as developing your marketing strategies.
- Subscription & Licencing fees – Depending on your payment schedule, make sure that all of your subscription and license fees are
Professional Website Management or DIY?
If you are not a website specialist, it can be surprising to realise just how much work needs to go into website maintenance. While you can take the time to shine up your team’s skills and manage your website in-house, there is also the option of outsourcing this to a professional team for a monthly cost on an ad-hoc basis.
Website maintenance packages have several important and useful benefits for businesses of every size. Firstly, it’s easily outsourced to a digital agency that already has the team, experience, and services in place to manage this task. Secondly, it allows you to free up your own resources to drive your business forward, rather than diverting them to routine, time-consuming tasks. Lastly, it allows you to leverage a digital agency’s expensive resources and maintenance team for your own business, using their solutions and skills to access a high-quality service at a predictable, set monthly cost to your business. This can be set on an ad-hoc basis, giving your business exceptional flexibility too.
At Virtuweb, we are very experienced in website maintenance and managing hundreds of thousands of website visits across a plethora of websites. If you’d like to chat, give us a call or take a look at our track record. Our maintenance team will be happy to show you how we’ll run your website and make it as effective as possible in this digital world. You can get in touch with us here.